Sunday, March 6, 2016

Lake Placid vs. Anaconda, Sorority Babes as Reptile Bait

The merging of the Anaconda and Lake Placid franchises has occurred. Big snakes, large crocs, covert corporate experiments....and lots of bikini babes (sometimes half bikinis) grace 2015's "Lake Placid vs. Anaconda." Corny CGI, horror film cliches, and lots of gore and nudity elevate this film to a must see, at least as far as this blog is concerned. However cliche this film appears, a scene near the end of the movie featuring a croc, an anaconda and a helicopter in flight is classic!

A secret experiment to combine giant crocodile DNA with anaconda DNA doesn't go so well, as the sedated creatures wake up during the experiment and escape. Tull (Corin Nemec) of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Sheriff Reba (Yancy Butler) team up to track the escaped beasts. Uh oh, an evil corporation needs to recover the beasts in order to complete their experiments which will yield a fountain of youth drug. Fountain of youth serums rarely turn out well in these films (Oil of Olay needn't fret). Ahhh, guess what! A sorority is having their rush week-end at the lake, and all our coeds are clad in bikinis. The monsters, gotta give them credit, are headed straight for the hazing. Pretty Bethany (Skye Laurie), who is a pledge....and Tull's daughter,is the least b#@&*y of the pledges, which is good, because the evil ones get eaten.

As the monsters make it to the lake and begin eating the babes, Tull and Reba high tail it over there too. Now on the run, many of the girls will end up as a buffet for our reptile aggressors. The more spoiled they are, the more gruesome their demise. Much of this film satisfies a certain Japanese fetish (...enough said about that). Just as it appears our protagonists are about to rescue the non-eaten pledges, the evil corporation shows up...heavily armed....and determined not to allow harm to come to their test subjects. Is it likely the reptiles will return this good will? The last 10 or 12 minutes is classic, and everyone...or everything gets what he, she, or it deserves.

Yancy Butler is terrific, as usual and so is Corin Nemec. Perhaps this film serves as a giant metaphor for the fate college girls suffer in the male dominated social structure of American university life. Or perhaps this is merely a giant monster movie with lots of gore and frivolous thrills. Either way, "Lake Placid vs. Anaconda" is so much fun.